Period. End of story. What’s for lunch? And anybody who says otherwise, including Mr. Obama (proving again that he’s just another politician) and Mrs. Bill (as if truth-telling were anywhere on her agenda), is either lying or ignorant.
And it’s as simple as that.
A “recession” has a clear definition; it’s not something that we define in some fuzzy, nebulous way. From Wikipedia, “a recession is a decline in a country’s real gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year.” That, my friends, is the definition. In the third quarter of 2007, the economy fairly roared along, growing at a 4.9% clip. It slowed in the fourth quarter to 0.6%. That’s not great, but it’s growth, not decline. We don’t have the numbers yet for the first quarter of 2008, and I’m not saying that the economy is buzzing, but what I am saying is this (and I’ll repeat, for those of you in Yorba Linda or West Palm): we are not in a recession, and anybody who says otherwise is either lying or ignorant.